It's to cloud gaming latency what a warp drive is to the cosmic speed limit — a workaround

If you aren’t sold on cloud gaming, we don’t blame you. We aren’t either. Despite all its inherent promise, cloud gaming continues to be held back by the high latency generally associated with wide area networks — not to mention the ridiculously fast internet speeds and plenty of spare bandwidth that are the other desiderata for a quality cloud gaming experience. But what if you wanted to enable a better cloud gaming experience but didn’t know of a way to directly lower latency? How about masking it?

All aboard the Steam stream train

Valve has announced that its In-Home streaming service is available to everyone on Steam. The feature, which has been in beta until now, allows Steam users to stream their games from one PC to another on their home network.

Walmart has begun serving cloud-based game demos on the Game Center section of its site, having struck a one-year deal for the same with cloud gaming startup Gaikai. Like with any cloud gaming service out there, the graphics are rendered in the cloud and then streamed to the user’s browser - all in real time, thereby eliminating the need to download or install anything related to the game. Hit the jump to find out more.

While there is no dearth of solutions for streaming PC-based movies, music and pictures to your TV, the PC games in your personal collection are still “unstreamable.” Enter AfterCAD, and its GameString Adrenalin service, and personal PC game libraries will become just as “streamable” as other media content.

So what exactly is GameString Adrenalin? AfterCAD is calling it “personal cloud gaming.” It essentially allows for PC games to be played remotely from within any Flash- or HTML5-enabled web browser. The company has even posted a video (below) of World of Warcraft being played on Google TV.

"Our GameString technology represents the next generation in cloud gaming as it doesn't rely on downloads, plugins, java or obscure codecs to work. The proof is in the fact it works with the Google TV right out of the box while other cloud gaming services will have to write an app to run it on,” said Chris Boothroyd, CEO of Aftercad.

“For Game Publishers looking to leverage the cloud to spice up the production values for Flash based social games, it is clear our approach is the way of the future and the way to go."

OnLive will have to contend with a little more than just leery onlookers and lack of optimum internet infrastructure in a couple of months' time. Streaming games service Gaikai is now feature complete and due for a December, 2011 launch, according to the company's co-founder and CEO David Perry. While Gaikai can look ahead to the same challenges as its better-known and more experienced rival, its approach to cloud gaming is markedly different.

Gaikai will stream subscription-free game demos to Flash-capable web browsers. This is how the company describes the service on its website: “Just like publishers and developers, retailers pay by the minute for the time that games are streamed on their sites. Once the user finishes playing, they are directed to your store -- still high on the excitement of the demo -- to complete the sale. Giving visitors the chance to try games before they buy can help them overcome hestiation and can faciliate impulse buys.”

So it isn't really a direct rival to OnLive, at least not until it starts streaming full games, but things could change.

Cloud gaming startup OnLive has been vacillating on its monthly subscription fee from its very inception. While it initially set out to charge $14.95 per month for the streaming games service, it not only lowered the monthly fee to $4.95 just before launch, but also offered a free one year subscription to early adopters – those who signed up during the service's inaugural month. But the company seems to have finally found a solution to its pricing conundrum.

“Although we wish we could have confirmed no monthly fee from the get-go, pioneering a major new video game paradigm is hard: we had to first grow to a large base of regular users before we could understand usage patterns and operating cost,” Perlman wrote in a blog post.

“Now that we’ve reached that stage, we can confidently say a monthly fee is not needed, which deserves a double WOOT! WOOT!”